It seems to be implying that ranked choice voting is going to be defeated or weakened by Democrats and Republicans banding together to defeat anything progressive. The words sounds right, and scan together coherently, and this combined with a bunch of other messages can lead someone through constant repetition to an overall vague impression that Democrats = bad, but it doesn't actually make any sense.

When are Democrats and Republicans going to band together? Have they done that to unseat Bernie Sanders, or are they unified in opposing Jill Stein and making sure to keep her out of power? The current administration of Republicans doesn't want it to be legal for Democrats to win elections at all. They're not suddenly going to be okay with the idea of handing over power to a D because there's a third party in the race.

Even if they did unite to defeat a progressive, how would that work under an RCV system? The whole idea of RCV is that you can vote for a third party without the math underlying FPTP elections making it impossible for them to win. The Ds and Rs can unite around their common corporate candidate, and then the third-party person is basically running against that person, and the majority vote-getter is going to win, unlike now where you have a choice of two corporate candidates and that's functionally it. Isn't that... better?

Just posting a comment that I think is wrong, I don't have a problem with. It was only when I looked back at their history and found that it's all "no Democrats" all the time and more or less nothing else that I decided they were some breed of misinformation and could go.

There are dozens of accounts on Lemmy that almost exclusively focus on tying any particular topic that's being discussed back around to why the Democrats are bad. This person is one of them.

Ranked Choice voting? Democrats and Republicans are basically the same, they're your enemy.

Kamala Harris did good in her interview? She's in Israel's pocket.

Obama said something? The ACA was awful.

I have no idea what this person's deal is, but I don't really care. If you want good politics things, then LFG, that's what this community is for. If you want to behave like a Heritage Foundation paid social media influence operation, I'm going to treat you accordingly. I think most of Lemmy's moderation teams are way too lenient on these chuckleheads.

All it takes is a political leader willing to do the politically painful job of taxing the fuck out of the Parasite Class

I don't think it works that way.

I'm not trying to say that would be a bad thing, it would be great. I think, though, that what really has to happen is strong unions fighting for their fair share.

For as long as people are looking to elect "the leaders" to fix things, things are going to stay unfixed. As soon as they take for themselves the political and economic power, within structures of power that are not political parties, they can have a real seat at the table, instead of finally finding someone else to send on a voyage to the great white father to come back to them with the right caliber of benefits secured.

It's been happening, the last few years. It's grand. And obviously, not having political leaders who want to return us to the days of feudalism or Nazi Germany as enforced with terrifying modern technology would be a nice boost to being able to get that done. But I think it has to come from unions and citizen activism in order to really come true in the right way. That's how it happened back when things really were okay in the country.

Cool beans.

https://business.time.com/2012/09/21/bitter-harvest-u-s-farmers-blame-billion-dollar-losses-on-immigration-laws/

https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article227483414.html

They're not exactly the story I was thinking of, but the pattern of actions is generally the same.

Good stuff. You can also do the same by talking with bot@rss.ponder.cat, if you don't want to install something separate:

https://ponder.cat/post/248105

I’m personally trying to stay out of (especially US) politics discussions as much as I can, as I don’t think there’s much to gain there for me anyway while potentially costing a lot of time and energy.

Without supporting their statements, unless they’re violating instance rules we’re generally trying to allow people to communicate their thoughts here without applying political bias to rule enforcement, at least on instance admin level.

The issue has nothing to do with their politics, it is that they're spamming and trolling. Plenty of people have their same politics, and because they don't make 15 posts a day on basically the exact same unwelcome topic every time, or write publication-length fanfiction about their "enemies" on lemmy.world, it's not a problem. Are you really not aware of this? I guess if you're not in the US politics community, you might not be. I'll do a report to lwreport with some details, if that's the place to put it.

I feel you as far as the admin team not wanting to step into the moderation of individual communities, but I also can't for the life of me understand why the politics moderation team is cool with him. I'm just talking to you about it because it came up, and because it seems nuts that someone can bring such a fountain of hexbear-type negative energy to the place with the full blessing of the mods.

Like I said, I'll send details to lwreport.

The leading case for this is an account with zero posts or comments, that downvoted more than 8k comments by the bot, 98.5% of all its comments. This is not legitimate voting behavior.

Following that, I see another user that downvoted the bot about 6.5k times, almost 80% of the bot’s comments, which makes up around 40% of their comment votes since the MBFC bot account was created.

Yes, I think throwing those two out is fair. Below them is someone who just votes a ton, who devoted 14% of their copious voting output to the bot. After that is a major instance admin who decided to give some thousand downvotes. After that is a long string of clearly real users who are giving a long string of hundreds of downvotes. My math puts it at 83% of the votes on my server that there's no reasonable excuse for throwing out being downvotes, but regardless of the exact number:

People don't like the bot.

Leaving aside one or two probable TOS violations, it still gets a broad majority of downvotes from clearly real accounts. Every conversation about it consists of roughly 90% detailed well-reasoned comments about why it shouldn't be. No other bot, and very few issues, anywhere on Lemmy attract this kind of hatred and controversy. It doesn't even really have to be a big deal, it's just weird that the people who operate the server are so attached to keeping it there.

I'm going to drop it now, because you're clearly not interested. Just offering my opinion on things. I also spent some time coding up some improvements to the bot based on feedback the community has been giving to it, after talking with jordanlund and Rooki, so I'm not just talking out of my ass here. I am trying to tell you what the broad majority of the community feels about it, if you want to hear.

Up ahead, a sudden flash of yellow light flared, then vanished, like a door had been cracked open and slammed shut in an instant. The man froze, a wave of panic clawing at him. He could turn back now, leave this cursed place behind, head home where everything was safe and familiar. Back to his room in his mom’s house. Back to his A.I. girlfriend. Back to his keyboard.

No! He hadn’t come this far to turn in this tracks and run like a kid trapped in a cemetery at night. There was no turning back. That fucking troll, Universal Monk must pay for his treachery!

Let me guess: He was thwarted in his quest like a Scooby-Doo villain, and the cool Universal Monk showed him up, and everyone clapped.

I'm impolite to you because you are trolling. Why would I be friendly to that? You reacted to the community's disapproval and requests for you to stop what you were doing by doubling down and adopting a gleeful serial-killer energy in all your interactions with them, while still posting 10-15 copies a day of more or less the exact same unwanted story. People aren't being mean to you because they dislike you, they're reacting to you being toxic and disrespectful directly to their face, and ignoring what they in all kinds of fashions have been telling you they would like the community to be.

I'm completely serious that I'm concerned about you. Excluding sleep and working, you've been averaging posting something on Lemmy every 9 minutes, every single hour of every single day for 2 months. You could have been accomplishing any number of projects with that, something you could be really proud of. Instead you've made it your mission to turn as many people as you possibly can, in this one weird little corner of the internet, into enemies for yourself. I don't know what would make you do that.

Nobody here set out to be unfriendly to you on purpose, because of who you are, or anything like that. They're reacting to what you are doing to them. Working hard to make everyone turn against you is going to turn people against you.

Curiosity got the best of me, and I skimmed one of them. This is psychotic. Who in God's name writes a publication-length short story about their "enemies" on Lemmy, investing this much gleeful energy into portraying them as these weird little gremlins who are out to get them but can't quite manage it because they are losers?

I only looked at one of them. I am, completely for serious, a little bit afraid to open up the others to see if they are all the same length as the one I looked at.

I'm looking at this guy in a whole new light at this point. I don't block him because every so often I like to drop into his comments and say something to move the conversation in the politics arena back towards what I think is productive politics arena things, but at this point I am concerned for him. I'm not joking.

Did you actually read the story though? I think you’ll recognize some of the things said in it! lol

What? No. Why would I do that?

Can I use your name for the next story I’m writing? Not exactly inspired by you, but from others in that community who’ve had some stuff to say. It’s fun too!

I started it last night and am finishing it up today, but I need a name!

What the fuck?

Oh sweet!

/u/UniversalMonk

Oh. Never mind.

My first story for this new community is “The Man Who Hunted Sea Lions on Lemmy.”

My god, I thought for a second I was just being cynical, and this was this person branching out and trying to do something other than making everyone mad, and here I was criticizing it. Nope.

I fully agree.

We can acknowledge that the system is tilted by money and media, without giving up as if it's all in control of the King and we can't do anything. I hear people talk about policing in their city, or wanting economic equity in the country, or what-have-you, as if it's all in the hands of the Gods and we have to moan about how they haven't done it for us yet, and hope that they do someday.

Doesn't work that way. The city council runs the police. There are elections. And so on. Make a union. Organize. Vote.

Don't you worry your pretty little head, Mr. Voter.

Textbank for Democrats: https://www.mobilize.us/ft6/?show_all_events=true&tag_ids=22573

Textbank for Ranked Choice Voting: https://represent.us/

It seems like a great thing, but I support unifying behind one big reform idea that's gaining traction and has name recognition, over splitting the energy too much to things that aren't on the ballot coming up right now.

That is absolutely fantastic. I signed up for a textbank shift this week, and I posted and pinned a link to it.

There have been sections of the border which enacted tough enough policies and technology to actually keep out illegal immigrants. Over time, it cratered the local economies, to the point that politicians got involved and fixed the border patrols back to the insecure way, so that everyone could have a big pool of desperate, vulnerable farm workers again.

It confuses me when people who argue “both sides” claim to support all those left policies when they don’t appear to have empathy or awareness of the marginalized.

They don't even really seem to support left policies that go much of anywhere outside the scope of not voting for Democrats.

They're not advocating for RCV, supporting protest movements or local races with prominent lefty candidates, or harping on critical climate issues or actions that fall outside the scope of electoral politics completely let alone the specific action of who you're going to vote for in November. They care a lot about politics. But mostly, what they want you to do is not vote for Democrats.

A very cynical person could draw a particular conclusion from that, but I'm not that person, so I won't.

a rather active user with political views not shared by most other users

Hahahahaha. Well put. I've also been vocal about my confusion that not much moderation-wise is being done about that user.

If I'm honest, it seems like the moderation team in general is messing up by how unresponsive they're being to the community as a whole, with those two accounts as good examples. I don't think it's a noisy minority. Just look at the votes. Votes aren't everything, but they're a good straw poll for how people feel, and I don't see how you can look at that voting pattern and say it's 1% of the users that don't like the account. It's more than that, it's a wide majority, and then also, some minority of them are willing to be vocal at length about why.

I appreciate the response. It's interesting and I'm not trying to put down the work of the admin team by saying these things. I'm just confused by the breakdown in communication and the dogmatic insistence on a certain way of looking at it, that's at odds with way almost all of the community looks at it. That and the lack of communication which is the main thrust of the post here.

It's your instance, you can do what you like. I'm just saying my reading of the situation as an amateur observer.

The depressing thing is, that's completely true. That's why RCV is important.

It's not a cure-all but it's a hell of lot better than FPTP.